


A life in Challenges

by Azashenya



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: 30 Days of Sherlock, Growing Up, child fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-20
Updated: 2016-09-25
Packaged: 2018-08-16 09:54:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8097637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azashenya/pseuds/Azashenya
Summary: A story about Gregory Lestrade using the 30 Days of Sherlock challenge prompts to guide each chapter.  The intent is to build it into a story rather than just a series of unrelated shorts and I'm looking forward to the journey, even in the first chapter I've learned details of Greg's childhood that I hadn't planned.
As much as I can have a plan for this at the beginning I hope to trace through Greg's life, including his time with Sherlock and beyond.  I will update tags with each chapter and will add warnings if they become necessary.





	1. Prologue: Beginning

**Author's Note:**

> This first chapter is more of a bonus as I got the prompt wrong in my enthusiasm to get started at bedtime last night.

_ A beginning. _

_ Almost a magical concept, the idea that every story must have a beginning, an ultimate antecedent. A “Once Upon A Time”. It’s one of those lies that childhood has taught us. _

_ Yet the stories of our lives have no single thing we can point to and say “it all started here”.  Not unless we are willing to begin all of our stories with the start of our universe, from that first moment of time and measure of space.  The ultimate beginning.  An exciting event that makes a boring beginning for most of our stories. _

_ Every moment that passes holds in it the potential for a world of beginnings and every story grows from many roots. _

_ We’ve already been given one beginning: an unlikely meeting in a room of St Bartholomew's Teaching Hospital.  But that is a story that we already know.  That is, as he would say, boring. _

_ Another place the story might start (that familiar story with that familiar name) is with a screaming infant being closely watched by the pale eyes of two older brothers. _

_ Still not our beginning. _

_ Let us trace another path. _

 

**London, Late 20th Century**

The bells of St Mary-le-Bow ring out over the rooftops to be met by the rising wail of a newborn child.  He was suppose to be born at hospital, in the maternity ward of St Bart’s, but his mother hasn’t made it past the front hall of her flat.  The noise and mess of his birth leads to the eviction notice she finds when they both return from being checked by a doctor.  The boy’s father vanished on her months ago.

This is Gregory Vincent Lestrade’s beginning.


	2. Shopping

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Even a well behaved toddler makes life exhausting.

Greg runs enthusiastically past the bright shop fronts while his mum, Maggie, keeps a firm hold of her end of his harness lead. When they enter a shop he ‘helps’ his mum carry the plastic basket, wrapping his small fingers around one side of the wire handle.

The shop is full of legs and shoes to watch. He looks around with wide eyes while his mum slowly fills the basket with fruit and vegetables.

One lady with a grey skirt and brown stockings and shoes leans down in a cloud of perfume to pinch his cheek. Greg frowns at her and shuffles behind his mum’s leg. The lady frowns at him and her voice makes Greg feel icky. He shuffles a bit further behind Mum and is glad when Mum distracts the lady by talking to her. When the lady moves away and his mum returns to filling a bag with potatoes Greg keeps hold of her trousers instead of moving back to helping with the basket.

At the checkout Mum picks Greg up so that he can help empty the basket for the shop lady. She is a nice one, not like that lady, and Greg smiles at her and tells her about the ducks they saw this morning. The shop lady gives him a lollie to suck on for being such a helpful boy, which is the best part of helping Mum with the shopping. As they leave the store he helps his mum carry the shopping bag between them.

Maggie walks home at the pace of short legs, hoping that her son will be tired enough for his afternoon nap by the time they get there. She is tired enough for a nap herself but one of the prices of sharing the spare room in her parents’ small flat is doing a larger share of the household chores. As she unlocks their front door she dreams of a future where she can afford a small flat, just for the two of them.


	3. Gardening

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Greg's first time gardening.
> 
> He's about 5 or 6 here.

“My dad’s got a veggie garden.”

“No he hasn’t.”

Jessica stamps her foot. “Yes he has!”

“Nah ha,” Greg shakes his head. “I’ve been to your place and there ain’t no garden.”

“Not by our house, silly. He’s got a whole ‘lotment of veggies and fruit and stuff.”

Greg frowns. “What’s a ‘lotment?”

“A place where Daddy grows veg’tables and stuff.”

“You sure you’re not making it up?”

“I’m not!” She scowls at him. “You’ll believe me if you come see it.”

Greg nods. He still isn’t sure that she’s not lying but she’s right that if he sees it he’ll believe is isn’t.

“Then I’ll ask my mum to ask your mum if you can come over and I’ll ask her to ask Grandad if he can take us ‘cos he knows as much about gardening as Dad does but he doesn’t have to work anymore ‘cos he’s old. So he’ll be able to take us after school, before it gets dark. Dad won’t mind ‘cos Granddad and I help him in the ‘lotment sometimes.”

Greg blinks then grins. “Cool. I’ll ask mum about it tonight.”

Which is how the next Wednesday afternoon finds Greg Lestrade in an allotment after school.

It’s typical London weather, damp. Greg doesn’t mind, he’s used to being out in the weather, just because it’s raining doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have to go to school or that he and Mum don’t have to deliver flyers. He does wish that his jacket wasn’t too small, with all the growing he’s done this winter his wrists are poking out of the ends of the sleeves which makes it harder to keep his hands warm, but he knows that Mum can’t afford to get him another one until next winter so he makes the best of it that he can. Besides if Mum got him a bigger one now it’d probably be getting too small by the time he really needs it next winter anyway.

Jessica’s Grandad is a tall man, taller than Greg’s grandad. His big hands are calloused and his finger thick and rough but his smile is friendly and he is pleased to see Jessica and meet Greg.

The fenced allotment proves to be not one garden but many, each with its own shed, beds of winter veggies, and fruit trees. There are round plants and leafy ones and fuzzy ones and tall ones and Greg is at a loss to figure out what many of them are. He does recognise the round balls of cabbages but nearly everything else looks different to the bags of vegetables his mum buys for them.

“Are all of these yours… ah… Jessica’s Dad’s?” he asks, awed by the riches of food growing here.

The old man laughs. “No, only one is Charlie’s allotment, the rest belong to lots of different people.” He leads the two of them to the third shed on the left, one of the bright blue ones. “This one is ours.”

“See, I told you we had a garden,” Jessica declares before dragging Greg down the path to show him what they’re growing. She very proudly tells him which plant is which, although her grandad has to help her a few times.

“What do you do with them now?” Greg asks after Jessica’s tour. “Some of them are pretty small.”

This provokes another adult laugh but Greg doesn’t mind too much as it doesn’t sound like a mean laugh. “Well some of them need to grow more before they are ready, a bit like you and Jessie here, but some of them we can harvest today. Some of them could do with weeding and we can check on the seed trays in the shed. If there’s an empty one we could start planting some more seeds ready for spring.”

Greg frowns. “What’s weeding?”

Jessica answers him with an excited bounce. “That’s where we take out all the plants that shouldn’t be growing there to give the veggies a better growing chance.”

“Um, but what if you pull out the wrong plants?” Greg asks, feeling self conscious about not having known what most of the plants were in the first place.

Jessica looks worried at that and looks up at her grandad who pats her shoulder reassuringly.

“Don’t worry about that today, Greg. If you’d like to help we can start with something that’s easy to tell the difference. The cabbages, beans, and broccoli are all well grown which makes it easy for us to pull out the weeds around them.”

Following his lead Greg and Jessica kneel down on the damp ground to clear the weeds from a bed of winter vegetables. While they are working the old man encourages the two children to tell him about their day at school and any interesting things they’ve been learning about or are planning to do. His eyes don’t miss Greg’s exposed wrists or the worn look to his clothing and when it’s time for them to go home Greg has a bag of vegetables that he helped harvest himself to take home with him.

By the time that Greg gets home his mum is home from work too. Very proudly he shows her all of the vegetables that Jessica’s grandad let him have as thank you for his help in the garden. Mum is very quiet as she gets the carrots and cabbage and cauliflower and broccoli and beans and such out of the bag, Greg doesn’t notice as he is too busy telling her all about helping in the garden and about the other plants that were growing and how the little shed even had a jug in it for making cups of tea.

It’s a little odd when mum give him an enormous hug but Greg doesn’t really mind, even if he’d never admit to his friends at school that he liked getting hugs from his mum.

Once she let go again Greg helped his mum to chop up some of the veggies for their dinner. Knowing that part of dinner was food that he brought home makes Greg feel even more proud. He feels like he’s really being the man of the house and looking after his mum like he promised Grandma and Grandad years ago, when he and Mum moved out of their flat into one of their very own.

The next Wednesday he and Jessica go to the allotment again to weed more of the garden beds and carefully plant seeds half a finger deep into little pots. Again Greg gets some veggies to bring home to his mum.

After a few weeks Jessica gets bored of playing in the garden every week but Greg doesn’t, as long as it means bringing home some fresh food and helping making things a bit easier for his mum he is determined to keep doing it. When Jessica’s grandad sees that he invites Greg to come along on a Sunday, when the allotment is full of all the other people working on their gardens, most of whom are more than happy to let him help out in exchange for a few spare veggies to take home.


	4. Gifts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Greg plans a Christmas surprise for Mum.
> 
> Author note: if nothing else this exercise is making me do lots of google searches about life in the 60s.

Greg pours out his money jar onto his bedspread, it makes a glittering pile of copper, brass, and silver. It’s the most money he’s ever had and he runs his fingers through the clinking pile. There are coins that he’s picked up off the pavement and a few from helping neighbours with things like carrying their bags home from the shops, but that’s only a small part of his hoard.

For nearly ten months now Greg has been spending Saturday and Sunday afternoons at the allotment. Learning more about gardening, helping in the different gardens, and, more importantly, getting to bring produce home to Mum. Often that would be more than he and his mum could eat before it started to go bad in the cupboard, so each week he would sell the extras to their neighbours for a bit of pocket money, a few pennies here and there.

Not that he’s managed to save all of it over those months, a few times he has succumbed to the temptation of sweets and comics. He’d have bought a lot more of both of them if not for his big plan, which it is finally time to start.

This year, for the first time, he can buy Mum something for Christmas. There’s never anything under the tree for her on Christmas morning. Greg used to think that that was awfully unfair of Santa. His mum is the best person in the world and Santa has his lists wrong if he thinks Mum been naughty and doesn’t deserve presents. Then last year Mike at school told him that there isn’t a Santa and all the gifts just come from your parents. Which means that Mum’s always had to buy or make all of Greg’s presents, and Greg knows that they don’t have money to spare for any extras, which makes him worry about his mum buying the presents. It also means that his mum not getting presents is his fault because without a dad he’s the man of the house so he should have been buying her Christmas presents.

Last year he only had a few pennies, so he’d bought her some sweets and made her a card at school. This time he’s determined to do better.

First he needs to know exactly how much he’s managed to save. He picks out the one big half crown and puts it carefully to the side. Then he picks out the rest of the silver coins and puts them into three piles: tanners, bobs, and a couple of florins. Next is the shiny brass coins that he likes to pretend are gold, the pennies and the thrupp’ny bits are nearly the same size as each other so he looks at them carefully as he sorts. This leaves him with a pile of coppery ha’pennies which he has more of than any of the other coins.

It takes him a while of careful reckoning but eventually he is certain of how much he has to spend. Although he is less certain of how many things it’ll mean he can buy for Mum. He scrapes the coins back into the small jar, making very sure not to miss any, and hides it away again. Tomorrow immediately after school will be the best time to start his shopping, he wants to keep it a secret from Mum to make sure it’s a proper Christmas surprise.

With his head full of plans he starts preparing the veggies so that they’re ready for when Mum gets home from work.

After school the next day Greg runs straight home to empty his school bag onto his bed and put the small jar of money into it. Worried about getting found out if Mum gets home before him he hides his school things where she won’t see them, that way he can just claim he was late getting home from school this afternoon. With the battered rectangular bag thumping against his leg he runs off to the shops.

~~

Christmas Eve is five times more exciting than last year. His secret presents are ready, hidden in the bottom of his wardrobe. Lying in bed he plans how to sneak past his sleeping mother in the morning to get the presents under their small tree. 

He can just imagine creeping like Spider-Man, maybe even crawling along the ceiling where Mum wouldn’t notice even if she woke up. If he could be as silent as a spider then he wouldn’t wake her at all. Peter Parker probably does it every year, although Greg doesn’t think that Aunt May would be sleeping on the couch like Mum. No one else's Mum doesn’t have a bedroom to sleep in.

Being Spider-Man would be really cool. If he was as old as Peter Parker then he’d be able to get a job and really help Mum as well as being able to fight bad guys and stuff like Spider-Man does.

He’s tempted to get his “The Amazing Spider-Man” comics out and read them to help him pretend that they’re actually about him but to do that he’ll have to turn the light on and then Mum will see it and tell him off. Besides, he has to get to sleep early tonight so that he can get up before her for the surprise tomorrow.

To distract himself he thinks about the presents hiding in his wardrobe. Because he loves his Christmas stocking so much he has made one for Mum with one of his rugby socks. He wasn’t sure what kind of toys Mum would like so it’s got things like candied ginger and a bag of her favourite sweets in it, as well as a candy cane and an orange because otherwise it wouldn’t be a Christmas stocking. There’s no bedpost on the couch so he’s planning to put it where she’ll see it when she wakes up.

There are also three wrapped gifts hidden with the stocking. A wooden spoon that Grandad helped him to carve; a box of new handkerchiefs; and a pretty necklace that he found in a junk shop.

He really, really wants to know whether Mum likes her presents. It has been hard keeping them a secret and the closer it gets to Christmas the harder it has been to keep. And the more excited he has been.

Eventually even very excited young boys fall asleep so that they can wake up on Christmas morning.


	5. Kisses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Getting too old for kisses.

Every Sunday, before he’s allowed to go to the allotment, Greg has to endure lunch with his grandparents. It isn’t all bad, it does mean a whole cooked meal that he and his mum haven’t had to make: roast meat and veggies and there is always pudding afterwards.

The part that makes it something to be endured is endlessly being told to sit up straight and mind his manners and use his knife and fork properly. Alone that wouldn’t be so bad a price for a free meal, and he does love his grandparents even if he wishes they’d stop nagging him about stuff like manners. The worst part is that every time they meet his grandma grabs his face and plants a embarrassing kiss right on his lips. It wasn’t so bad when he was little but he’s nearly ten now and it just feels uncomfortable.

Greg and Mum are walking to Grandma and Grandad’s place when he finds the nerves to ask her about it.

“Mum…”

“Yes?”

“Um… Grandma’s kisses…” he scuffs his feet as he walks beside her, feeling completely uncomfortable.

“Don’t scuff your feet, Greg, you’ll wear out your shoes.”

“Yes, Mum,” he mumbles, exaggerating picking his feet up with each step.

Maggie smiles fondly and sighs. “They’re a bit much, aren’t they.”

Greg nods. “How… what can I do? I’ve tried dodging but she grabs my face.”

His mum nods and Greg is relieved that she understands.

“You have to tell her that you’re too old for those kind of Grandma kisses.” Maggie pauses and looks at her son. He’s growing up so fast, it feels like only yesterday he was running on short, unsteady legs, giving her big sloppy kisses, and falling asleep on her lap.

“I can do that.”

She smiles at him. “Your grandma will be sad not to get any more kisses. You could offer cheek kisses instead, if you’d be good with that.”

Greg thinks about that as they continue to walk. He thinks he’s probably getting a bit old for grandma kisses anyway, on the other hand he does love his grandma and wouldn’t want to make her sad.

“What about if she only kisses me after we get inside? As well as them only being cheek kisses.”

“That sounds like a good compromise.”

They walk in silence for a minute or so.

“What about me, am I still allowed to kiss you outside of the house?” Mum asks in a laughing voice as she swoops on Greg to kiss his cheek lightly, she only has to bend down a little to do that now.

“Aw, Mum!” Greg protests, wiping his cheek and blushing, but he’s also laughing.

“Not even on special occasions?” she asks with a mock-hurt expression.

Greg purses his lips and tries to look thoughtful. “Maybe on very special occasions, as long as none of my friends can see us.”

Maggie grins, glad of a little more time before her boy decides he’s too old for any embarrassing shows of affection from his mother.


	6. Work

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A new job for Mum means more work for Greg.

Greg’s new alarm clock goes off, ringing its strident bell into the dark room. Dragged from sleep Greg flails an arm to catch the round clock and press in the little button. As he rolls out of his warm bed he hopes that the noise hasn’t woken Mum in her room, her days are long enough since getting her new job without Greg waking her early.

He scrubs his face and hands and drags on his school clothes, barely needing to open his eyes to do so. Desperate not to be late he grabs his bag and runs out the door. It’s only his second week of doing the morning paper delivery rounds completely by himself and he is determined not to mess up.

“You’re an early one, Greg,” the newsagent comments, counting off the papers for Greg’s round. “First boy in again.”

As soon as his bag is full Greg runs off, although not as fast as when the bag was empty. He and Mum moved flats after she got her new job and he’s still learning all of the streets around here. He takes the shortcuts he has figured out and is soon at the start of his round.

He has to go back for more papers twice before he is finished and can return home. Mum has gone to work already but she’s left him a plate of cooked breakfast on the table. Greg pauses just long enough to wolf the cold food down before grabbing his school bag and running to school. Both school and the allotment are further away than they were from the old flat, but soon he’ll be going to the Comprehensive which is much closer. He’s still annoyed about living so far from the allotment.

School is school. From the bottle of watery milk to the grossness of school lunches. Hours spent sitting at his desk and copying from the board. Chanting their times-tables in maths, reciting poetry and practicing their handwriting in English class. A pre-adolescent’s increasing embarrassment of stripping to his underwear to do ‘Movement and Music’ in the school hall, under the direction of the school radio, tuned to the BBC.

The best part of the day is playing rugby with his friends after scoffing down their lunches and before next class starts. 

Soon enough the school day is over and he carries his books and homework assignments back home. The other boys are setting up for a game of soccer on the street but he doesn’t have time to join in today so he starts running before they can try and talk him into staying.

At home he picks up Mum’s shopping list and checks that nothing else needs to be added. She has left him money in the special leather purse. He opens it and checks the coins carefully before going to his bedroom and adding a few more from his money jar. Mum refused to take any of his delivery money but she won’t notice if he slips some into the shopping money, at least that’s his theory.


End file.
